# Bender: New & Selected Poems - Hardcover

by **Dean Young** (Author)

Young's _Bender_ is a book of survival and strength, of seeing even in the smallest things the heights of what we can be. That's as good a definition of contemporary poetry as any.--NPR

This book reads like a long, breathless thank you for life's seemingly random jumble of beauty, strangeness, tenderness, and joy.-- _Los Angeles Times_

The reader's mind shoots through Young's poems\] like the steel ball in a pinball machine, dinging around, racking up points. Dean's poems are amazingly fun.-- _BOMB_

After 10 books over 20-odd years, Young has become one of our most imitated poets: his jocular jumps from topic to topic, debts to Surrealist dream-logic, mixture of postmodern oddity, stand-up comedy and weighty pathos land his work somewhere between John Ashbery (to whom Young owes much) and Billy Collins (whose affability Young shares). --_Publishers Weekly_

Young revitalizes the lyric by reminding us that Art must never be less explosive and majestic and joyous than Life, lest it not only be no temporary substitute for Life but also no fitting representation of (or challenge to) life's regularities and irregularities. Bender will make you laugh, reflect, and marvel at how the contrary impulses and instantiations of both Life and Art can so readily be distilled in the sensibilities of a single man, or--in the case of _Bender_\--a single book. --_The Huffington Post_

Dean Young's _Bender: New & Selected Poems_ provides a direct experience with all the stunning possibilities of language at its most sublime.-- _The Journal_

**From Even Funnnier Looking Now:**

_If someone had asked me then,  
Do you suffer from the umbrage of dawn's  
dark race horses, is your heart a prisoner  
of raindrops? Hell yes I would have said  
or No way Never would I have said,  
What could you possibly be talking about?  
I had just gotten to the twentieth century  
like a leftover girder from the Eiffel Tower.  
My Indian name was Pressure-Per-Square-Inch.  
I knew I was made of glass but I didn't  
yet know what glass was made of: hot sand  
inside me like pee going all the wrong  
directions, probably into my heart  
which I knew was made of gold foil  
glued to dust . . ._

  

### Author Biography

Dean Young: Dean Young has published ten books of poetry, including finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and Griffin Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, as well as an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas.

**Number of Pages:** 279

**Dimensions:** 1.3 x 9.1 x 6.2 IN

**Publication Date:** October 30, 2012

## Details

- **Price:** 26.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 26.00 USD | In stock |

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- Bender: New & Selected Poems - Hardcover

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